James
Joyce was born in Dublin on 2 February 1882, the eldest surviving
son of a large middle class family, which after brief prosperity
collapsed into poverty.

He was educated by the Jesuits, first at Clongowes Wood College
in Co. Kildare and then at Belvedere College in Dublin where he
first displayed his writing talent.

After
school, he attended what is now University College Dublin, where
he took a Bachelor of Arts in 1902. After graduation, Joyce traveled
to Paris with the intention of attending medical school. However,
his passion to write soon lead him to abandon his studies to write
poems, book reviews and develop a theory of aesthetics.

He
returned to Ireland in the spring of 1903 due to the fatal illness
of his mother. Between then and autumn of 1904 he wrote some of
the opening stories of Dubliners and began on an early draft of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, called Stephen Hero.

Nora
Barnacle with Giorgio and Lucia

In
the summer in 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, a girl from Galway working
at Finn's Hotel in Dublin. By autumn they moved together to the
Continent, where Joyce had secured a job teaching English.

They
first lived in Pola, and then Trieste, where they raised a son
and daughter. Over the next decade Joyce published his first collection
of poems Chamber Music in 1907 and his collection of short stories
Dubliners, in 1914.

In
1915 the First World War forced them to move to Zurich, in neutral
Switzerland, where they remained until 1919. During this time
Joyce published his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, in 1916 and a play, Exiles, in 1918. He was also continued
working on Ulysses, which he had begun in 1914.

After
the war they moved to Paris, where Joyce arranged for the publication
of Ulysses, which came out on his 40th birthday - 2 Febraury 1922.
Later that year he began work on Finnegans Wake, which was published
in 1939.

The
outbreak of World War II forced the Joyce's to move again, first
to unoccupied France and then back to Zurich, where he died on
13th January 1941. He was buried in Fluntern Cemetery.

IntroductionJoseph O'Connor, Edna O'Brien and Gerry O'Flaherty
recall the events and characters of this day and explore why
James Joyce's fictionalised events of an ordinary day should
become such a literary masterpiece.